Right to Fight to be launched

It has been said that the tortuous, and often confused and confusing road to Mangaung began in 1996 with the anti-privatisation protests and the introduction of the government’s Growth Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy. This was also the year that the country’s internationally acclaimed cartoonist, Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro), launched his first annual selection of cartoons and Terry Bell’s first Inside Labour column appeared in Business Report.

Throughout the years since then, Zapiro, in graphic form, has captured the vagaries and vicissitudes of South African political and economic life while Bell in prose, has done the same, with a focus on labour. As a result, both have been praised and pilloried — and both have been honoured for “speaking truth to power”.

Bell has now produced a selection of his columns over the 17 years, each section headed by an appropriate Zapiro cartoon for the year and with a cover and an introductory cartoon which Bell feels sum up two critical global realities: growing joblessness in a world where millions of men and women are being made permanently redundant — and the surplus capacity and production that lies at the root of this.

Bell, who has campaigned for years to have VAT removed from books, under the slogan, “Don’t tax literacy” has set a retail price of “no more than R135” for his Right to Fight. So if you are in Cape Town…..R2F blog.pdf

Cock up. The Book Lounge Invite, with book cover pdf would not load. The launch is at the Book Lounge from 17:30 on Thursday, December 13. Copies are also available from me (p&p paid). Contact: belnews@telkomsa.net